Front-Porch Poetry and Quiet Heartbreak Define Josiah and the Bonnevilles’ Valiant ‘As Is’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

For the past ten years, Josiah Leming has been releasing music under the moniker Josiah and the Bonnevilles, steadily sloughing off the mortal coils of the pristinely produced pop/rock that marked his early work following his appearance on the seventh season of American Idol. What he has bequeathed to himself and his listeners is a music of storytelling through bright melodies in spare arrangements, usually surrounding him and his acoustic guitar. Josiah and the Bonnevilles reached a high-water mark with 2023’s Endurance, an album of 13 songs that plumb the depths of trials and uncover what it means to persevere.

Now, Leming releases As Is, a ten-song set that moves restlessly through a more diverse sonic palette, employing an expansive cast of musicians and songwriters, including (but not limited to) Colin Croom, Brian Stanley, Ryan Levine, and Philip Bowen in the former group and Joel Little, Anna Hamilton, Marc Scibilia, and Natalie Hemby in the latter. From the electric guitar on the album opener, “Good Boy,” to the quiet piano on “Youth and Dreams,” to the banjo to his trusty acoustic guitar, Leming situates himself at a variety of instruments, leaving the others to fill in around him.

Much like the album’s title, the songs on As Is have a take-them-or-leave-them quality. Whether through the tentative beginnings of some or the sudden inglorious endings of others, most of the songs feel like they were captured the moment they emerged and left to their own devices. If “Mountain Girl” sounds strikingly like the beginning of Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” that’s ok. It evolves into its own thing. And if “Hell Without the Flames” ends the gritty drama in Leming’s voice by eschewing drama, well, that’s just too bad. The concluding title track, with Leming’s spoken-word narrative of finding a busted guitar or broken-down bartender, “as is,” feels like a benediction on the state of the songs you’ve just heard and maybe on the state of the listener.

I don’t mean to imply that the songs are bad or aloof. Far from it. Something about Leming’s songs invites participation in a way that goes beyond his Instagram description, “Y’all are the Bonnevilles.” He doesn’t sacrifice relatability for the sake of insight. He can merge the cycle of receiving and inflicting pain with the reliable narrative of “a good night/ Turned into a bar fight and/ Ended with a car ride downtown.” He can take fragmentary images of “skin,” “blood,” and “God on a burned CD” and give them the uncertain sum of “youth and dreams” without straining.

The synthesis of Leming’s down-home diction with his sturdy pop-like melodies gives his songs a front-porch feel with none of the campiness. He rattles off places “south of Athens,” and in and around Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Durham, and Tennessee, like you and he used to roll in and out of those towns all the time. But watching from within the ease of his delivery is the keen poetic eye that rhymes “started” with “Charlotte” and navigates around a thousand poetic cliches with lines like, “Well I bet that it was raining on the day that she was born/ And the blue skies went a’hiding in her eyes to pass the storm.”

Unlike the stories he tells on Endurance, the songs of As Is focus mainly on relationships. It’s neither an album of love songs nor a break-up album. But most of the songs seem to plot the losing end of a take it or leave it situation. Even so, As Is ends on a hopeful note with the resplendent “Mountain Girl,” the slow aching “Red Line,” and the title track, offering a kind of reconciliation between the state we find ourselves in and the one we long for.

Leming’s voice takes on an almost chant-like quality as he closes the record: “You see a little light come running/ Out of the scars and cracks/ As is/ Kind of thing you just hold once/ And you’re never gonna give it back/ As is.”